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Bobalouie Christmas & new years in Saint Petersburg is very beautiful. Olga and I have lots of memories, photos and videos. Make sure you hook up with Phil & Nina, you will have the best person and friend to show you the real Saint Petersburg. Just outside of town you can even take a romantic Sani ride through the countryside.

Often it's too cold for children to venture outside so a mother must be very good at entertaining little ones in addition to all her other household duties.

Heat can be erratic: Most Russian and Ukrainian apartments have "central heating." By that we mean it is fed via steam, to entire blocks and rows of apartment buildings. Individual apartments have steam radiators, most often without controls entirely or with valves so old and rusted that to adjust them is an invitation to a disasterous steam explosion. When it's too hot, one cracks open a window. When it's too cold you close the window. That is your "thermostat." In fact, apartments built before the early 2000s don't even have thermostats. A thermostat is made to control the flow and the flow is controlled not by you, but by Boris down at the local steam station.

If you want to know the temperature most apartment dwellers have a thermometer attached to an outside window. Inside, you already know if it's warm or cold. What you want to know is, how cold is it outside?

In daytime much of the steam is diverted away from the apartment blocks (the Russian term is "sleeping zones") and fed to business and shops which are open in daytime. It may become chilly in your apartment so you'll "layer" your clothing depending on the warmth inside your home.

At night the opposite takes place. Well, it's susposed to take place. Working past 4pm at the office can get chilly because thats about the time when the steam begins to be redirected back to apartment blocks in the "sleeping zones." Employees who work late begin to "layer" clothing as they continue to work.

When to take a shower: Morning is not a good time. Your body will be softened by the warm water, and exposure to the freezing temperatures and wind combine for the perfect recipe for pneumonia. Showers are safer at night after you've completed all the outdoor activities.

Its not uncommon at night for your apartment to become very warm as you go to sleep but by morning it may be drifting back to the chilly side of living.

Those modern electric somavar hot water kettles are busy on cold winter days and nights. Tea is a staple all year long, but doubles as medicine for sore throats in winter.

Footnote: This painting is a winter scene by my wife and titled "Patriarch's Park."

On a cold "Christmasy" night it's fun to crawl into a warm bed with your lady. Here is how that is done (as if any of you guys needed help!):

- Clear the room. Just a few minutes ago it was a living room, dining room or day work space.- Pull out the sofa. - Lift up the sofa top and bring out the blankets and pillows where they were stored.- Make the bed (fitted sheets are useless here--every sheet is "flat."- Arrange the blankets, the cover, and the pillows.- Pillows are the square European style (very unlike the long American style pillows).- Your lady probably likes the bright designs on her sheets. They can be very colourful. The most colourful I've seen were made in Ukraine and Belarussia.- Your lady probably likes a coverlet on top of it all. It's two sheets sewn together, with designs and literally stuffed with a blanket inside. Very colourful. Very warm with that blanket stuffed inside it!- Now, slip inside and snuggle! 8)

And in the morning you store the bedding inside the sofa, fold it back into it's daytime sofa shape, move the furnishings back into their daytime arrangement and presto....you're back in the living room, dining room, work space, etc.

Some key things to know:- Because of the differences in sizes, American bedding in particular doesn't work well in Russia. The fitted sheet--useless, it's too wide, made for a thick mattress not found too often in Russia, and not practical. The flat sheet can be used but is way too big for those narrow bed sizes. The pillowcases won't fit those square pillows either.- Americans love thick and fluffy bath towels, especially in winter. Beware, they take up too much space in those small European washing machines, not to mention the narrow towel racks in bathrooms already cramped for space. - What does make a good gift is a nice thick wool blanket. Especially the twin bed sizes--they'll work fine on a regular "double bed" in Russia. The thicker and more colourful...the better.

Yes, in day the sofa is called a диван (di-vahn) and by night it is a кровать (kra-vat).

Bedding footnote: A man just meeting a lady should never take a bedding gift. It's considered in the "intimate" catagory and better left for after a relationship is well established. You don't want to offend her family in an early meeting.

The mist of the storm covers the sky,The whirlwinds of snow are spinning;Now, like a wild beast it calls,now it cries like a child,Now about the roof, decrepit,Suddenly it rustles the thatches,Now, like a traveler overdue,to us on the window knocks.

Our ancient hutis mournful and gloomy.Why have you, my old lady,Become silent at the window?Is it the howl of the tempestThat makes you, my friend, fatigued,Or are you drowsing under the humOf your spindle?

Let's drink good friendOf my poor youth,Let's drink away grief; where is the tankard?It will make our hearts gay.Intoxicate, me with a song, like a titmouseQuietly living across the sea;Intoxicate me with a song, like a girlWho went for the water in the morning.

The mist of the storm covers the sky,The whirlwinds of snow are spinning;Now, like a wild beast, it calls,Now it cries, like a child.Let's drink, good friendOf my poor youth,Let's drink away grief; where is the tankard?It will make our hearts gay.

Painting:My wife's rendition of the city of Kaluga which won it's catagory in 2002 exhibition, "Blue Kaluga."

There'll be no one in the houseSave for twilight. All alone,Winter's day seen in the space that'sMade by curtains left undrawn.

Only flash-past of the wet whiteSnowflake clusters, glimpsed and gone.Only roofs and snows, and save forRoofs and snow - no one at home.

Once more, frost will trace its patterns,I'll be haunted once againBy my last-year's melancholy,By that other wintertime.

Once more I'll be troubled by anOld, un-expiated shame,And the icy firewood famineWill press on the window-pane.

But the quiver of intrusionThrough those curtain folds will runMeasuring silence with your footsteps,Like the future, in you'll come.

You'll appear there in the doorwayWearing something white and plain,Something in the very stuff fromWhich the snowflakes too are sewn.

Russian composer Mikael Tariverdiev set this poem of Boris Pasternak (as many others his poems) to music and now you can here this song in movie "The Irony Of Fate, Or Enjoy Your Bath" ( Ironiya Sudby ili S Lyogkim Parom) by Eldar Ryazanov.

This modestly budgeted, made-for-TV romantic comedy became one of the most popular films in the former Soviet Union and a staple of TV broadcasts on New Year's Eve. It's based on the premise that modern apartment complexes look so much alike that one cannot distinguish one city from another. On New Year's Eve, Muscovite Yevgeny Lukashin (Andrei Myagkov) finally dares to make a marriage proposal to Galya (Olga Naumenko). They plan to celebrate the New Year together quietly, but Lukashin's friends convince him that first he should attend their annual meeting at a bathhouse. The meeting quickly turns into an improvisational bachelor party for Yevgeny. Having consumed large amounts of alcohol, they cannot remember which one of them was supposed to fly to Leningrad to meet his wife. So they put the sleepy Lukashin on a plane. Upon his arrival in the Leningrad airport, Yevgeny gives the taxi driver his Moscow street address and the cab takes him to an apartment complex located on a street with the same name. The building looks very much like his own, so Lukashin, still not quite sober, does not realize that he is in another city. He enters someone else's apartment because his key fits the door lock and he quickly falls asleep on a couch. When the apartment's rightful resident, Nadya (Polish actress Barbara Brylska), comes home, she wakes up the intruder and tells him to get out. The bewildered Yevgeny insists that he is at home and she is the one who should get out. Eventually he sobers and finds out about his predicament. He is about to leave when the situation is further complicated by the arrival of Nadya's straight-laced fiancé Ippolit (Yuri Yakovlev) who does not believe in Lukashin's story and accuses Nadya of being unfaithful. The interaction between the three characters results in Nadya and Yevgeny's gradual falling in love with each other. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide